


heart of winter

by venndaai



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, Dark Fantasy, Gen, Implied Cannibalism, Paranormal, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:27:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25376140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: The blood is a gift; she can follow dark red tracks, through the snow.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett/Yasha (implied), Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	heart of winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quantumvelvet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumvelvet/gifts).



Yasha leaves them in autumn. She leaves them in Jester’s mother’s house in Nicodranas, jammed around a table covered in half-consumed drinks. She leaves Jester bright-eyed and gesticulating about new plans for the cult of the Traveler; she leaves Beau half asleep on Jester’s shoulder, the blue of her new uniform a single shade off from the blue of Jester’s skin. She leaves Fjord happily watching the others, a new sense of contented security in his eyes; she leaves Caleb and Veth drawing spell runes in beer on an expensive polished table top; she leaves Caduceus outside, in the oranges and blues of a Menagerie sunset. She leaves him with a pressed orange flower.

She remembers the taste of mint tea, and his voice when he’d said, “To surviving,” clinking his mug against hers. She wonders if he’d ever understand that that’s still what she’s doing. 

“They’ll miss you,” he says, looking down at her, voice gentle. “We’ll miss you.”

It’s true. They will. But they’re used to her leaving without goodbyes. 

The journey from Nicodranas up into the Cyrios Mountains is long, and arduous, once the road climbs from the coast up into the peaks. With a spellcaster at her side she might have reached her destination in moments. If she had wings that could fly, it might have taken her days. Alone, on foot, she walks. The green hills turn to red and gold forests, leaves burning bright with the passing of the season. The air loses its salt tang and gains the crispness of distant ice. 

The swamp is colder than she remembers, but she’s used to cold, however much she hates it. There will be worse, she is sure, before spring comes. 

The hag’s hut seems exactly the same, and that unnerves her, for some reason. She feels as though it should not be a sedentary thing. It should not have been so easy for her to find her way back here. 

The hag is not surprised by her return. 

“Do you bring something better to offer, this time?” the hag asks her.

She holds in her mind the memory of Jester’s laugh, of Beau’s sharp eyes. “Yes,” she says. 

Between the Cyrios Mountains and the Savalirwood lies the entire breadth of the Dwendalian Empire. Yasha walks. Down mountainsides, across rivers and gorges, through brushland dotted with strange piles of rocks. Her food runs out, and she hunts, and curses the lost time. Some days panic takes her, and she runs, as though what she runs to is right over the next peak, as though she can reach there with the frantic pounding of her heart alone. She runs until her legs give out from under her. She sleeps and the Stormlord calls to her in dreams. Each night she refuses him. 

She reaches a road, after a while. She walks. 

The first snowfall arrives before she is even halfway. By the time she finally leaves the Empire, returning to the Greying Wildlands as she always somehow knew she would, the snow lies deep and silent on the gray mountains, the black trees. 

She does not pass through Shady Creek Run, and she does not speak to travellers on the road. Still, she stops to listen as they chat to each other around a friendly evening fire. The Savalirwood is stranger and more hostile than usual. There are rumors, among the local hunters and trappers, of monstrous noises coming from the dark heart of the forest. Of mutilated animals and blood on snow. 

She tries, very badly, not to hope. 

The winter forest is very quiet, except for the irregular pattering sound as a heavily laden branch breaks under the strain of its burden of snow. It is not the kind of terrain Yasha is most familiar with, but she fits into it, its silence, its white blankness. In winter, the strangeness of the cursed forest is not so apparent; but underneath their cover of snow, the needles that should be dark green are instead a gray purple. 

It is only perhaps a mile from the road where she finds the first body.

The deer was starving, she thinks. It could not have had much meat on its bones. Perhaps that’s why the corpse is in such disarray. A disappointed, desperately hungry predator sucking the marrow from cracked bones. But this consumption was not clean and thorough. Blood and guts are spattered across the snow.

There’s a moment where she’s lost in a sudden sense memory. The cold crispness of the forest is replaced by desert heat, everything dry, dry, except the wetness in her hands, her mouth. The growl in her throat as she reached down to pull more life from her prey.

Yes, she knows this kind of hunger. 

The blood is a gift; she can follow dark red tracks, through the snow.

The next body she finds is not a deer. 

The carnival, she remembers, never traveled in the heart of winter. Too dangerous on the roads, and people too unwilling to leave their homes. “What do you do, then?” she had asked, curled up in the back of a caravan, Molly’s small narrow body folded between her knees and elbows. They both hated the cold, even the mild chill of spring nights. Winter was a misery she was trying to forget, as the days lengthened and flowers began to dot the roadsides. 

The book Molly had given her rested under her coat, its corners digging into her side, reassuring her of its presence. She had twelve flowers in it already. 

Molly had sighed. She had felt his ribcage shake with the exhalation. His tail flicked against her leg. “Carnival splits up,” he had said. “They hole up for the winter, most of them. I go. Explore on my own, have some fun.” Thwack, thwack, the curved blade at the end of his tail hits her gently. “I don’t like staying still for too long.”

“I’ll come with you,” she had promised. “This winter. I’ll go with you.”

She couldn’t see his smile, in the dark, tucked against her chest, but she knew it was there. “No, you won’t,” he’d said. “You’ll go off on your own again.” 

He’d probably been right. She’d left twice already, the pressure of being around others building until it was unbearable, until all she’d wanted was to get away, to be unseen in the quiet emptiness of wilderness. 

_If I could do it again,_ she thinks now, _I’d never leave._

_Give me another chance and I’ll stay. I’ll stay._

There is a cabin, in the woods. Perhaps once it belonged to a hunter, or a hermit. It has not belonged to anyone for many years, she guesses, judging by the dead winter skeletons of vines tearing at its walls, the holes in the roof. That is a relief. 

She hopes the cabin means something. That he understands the idea of shelter, at least. 

Outside the snowy landscape is dazzlingly bright, sun reflecting off of white from many angles. Inside the cabin is dark. She squints, standing in the threshold. 

There is movement inside. 

“Molly,” she says. And then, “I’m here.”

What else is there to say?

She hears a low growl.

She steps inside. 

  
  


He’d told her the truth about his past, the first time she asked. Maybe he’d thought there was no way to fool her with a dazzling lie, while she was working for the carnival, with so many people who could tell her the real story, even if she never talked to anyone but him. So he’d told her instead, quietly, when they were sitting together outside a tent, basking in the heat of the oncoming summer sun, about how the carnival had found him. How he hadn’t known, at first, how to talk, or dress himself. It seemed impossible to believe, fitting that idea together with the imagine in her mind of Mollymauk, ever loquacious, always attentive to appearances. He bought or stole the most colorful items of clothing he could find and then painstakingly modified them to be even more eye-searing. He did something similar with language, she thought, with the way he picked up new words wherever he could and fit them into his sentences like a magpie’s treasures. 

She had no new words to give him. She never had anything to give him, not in exchange for the book, the flowers, the gentle press of lips to cheek or forehead, the coin he hustled out of the towns they passed through and insisted on splitting with her, because he had decided they were one thing now, two parts of a whole. The truth that he told her; that once he had been voiceless in the dark.

Maybe she did have something she could have given, for that. She could have told him of the dark times, the empty time before she found herself at the Stormcaller’s altar. The vague memories of blood. But she thought- she thought there would be time later. Later. She could wander away into the empty spaces when the pressure got too much, and the carnival would always be there when she came back. He would be there. 

Sometimes it feels as though every lesson she has learned in life has been taught in blood. The smell of it is intimately familiar, now. 

The cabin reeks of it. 

Her eyes are sharp in the darkness, but as they adjust she sees only grays, and somehow… that hurts. Her life has always been painted in shades of black and white and gray, and all the color in it came with them; with Zuala, and with Molly. 

Whenever she remembered him, she remembered color. Purple and red and so many others. 

On the floor of the cabin-

She sees the shiver of movement, hears the low growl, smells the blood, and all her instincts say, _thing. Creature. Threat_. But then those pupilless red eyes turn towards her, and she sees the broken curl of horns, the dearly familiar angle of nose and cheekbone turned sharper, more hollow, and it’s Molly. It’s Molly. And part of her that has been broken since that other day in the snow snaps back into place like a bone resetting, and through the pain comes the light dizziness of relief. She falls to her knees, feeling the rough splintered grain of the planks beneath her. 

“Hello,” she says. “It’s me.”

She can’t tell if that means anything to him. His head tilts a bit. She can hear a repetitive noise which she thinks might be his tail, lashing out against floor or wall. The others, they buried him in everything but his coat, and she can see the rags of those wonderful circus clothes, their colors and patterns lost to dirt and blood and shredding. She took so long to get here. She is always so late. 

She can see bare chest through gaps in the rags. The crisscross of scars is reassuring. They’re Molly’s. She saw Summer’s Dance, graceful in his hands, slice into his skin. That time hasn’t been erased. His tattoos, it looks like they’re still there, too. He added so much to the canvas he was given, marked out ownership of this body as though his claim to it might be disputed. Surely his efforts will have worked. Surely at any moment she’ll hear words from that bloody mouth. _Took you long enough, darling. What’s this, tears? Can’t have that. Come here, come here._

There’s an extra scar, over his heart, so long, still bleeding a little in places.

She thinks about showing him the book, the gift he gave her. The pages at the front are full of flowers he gave her, little things, more faded than her later collections but still beautiful. Wildflowers picked from roadsides, tucked behind her ears or suddenly appearing like magic in a proffered fist. Braided into her hair, once or twice.

She does not take it out of her bag. The book, she knows, had no particular meaning to him. If he knows anything it will be her face. 

They look into each other’s eyes. Not something she usually does much of. Direct eye contact is for intimidation. For staring down a rival predator and telling them, _back off_. Mine. But Molly liked looking people in the eyes. Said it made them feel special. And it worked, usually, even when his targets were disconcerted at first by the dull red glow of his gaze. Something about Molly always won them over. 

So she looks. He looks back. The growling dies away. She holds her breath.

He goes for her throat. 

  
  


She doesn’t hurt him. She could, easily. Molly always fought with wits and bravado and bloodlust and he’s lost two of the three, and she’s learned so much, in all this time without him. And he’s starved. Nothing but small brittle bones bound together with skin, and that scares her. 

He doesn’t touch the first deer she brings him, though she leaves it inside the doorway before retreating back across the snowy clearing. After a while she eats it herself, raw, as the sun sinks. Then she walks into the woods again, and finds a place where she can sit very still, until a rabbit hops almost into her hands. 

She takes it to him still alive, and he snatches it from her hands. 

He swallows its heart and lungs and tongue, and then he wipes the blood from his mouth and stares at nothing and says, in a voice painfully harsh from disuse, “Yasha.”

He says nothing else, though she sits in the doorway for a long, long, time. But he doesn’t attack her again.

He lets her sleep in the cabin, at the end of the first week. She brings him live animals, all she can find, and on the tenth day he lets her wash the blood from his skin, and braid his long tangled hair, and cry a little over the broken tips of his horns. 

After a month he begins, sometimes, to rest his head on the broad expanse of her thigh, as they both shiver by the cabin’s fireplace, snow falling in the woods outside. 

Slowly, flesh covers his bones. His eyes and cheeks become less sunken. His ribs are no longer so exposed. 

He doesn’t say any more words. He doesn’t need to, Yasha tells herself. 

She always knew that no matter what bargain she struck, she would be feeding the hag a long-lasting supply of misery. That’s all right. She’s used to misery. She looks at her friend, her friend who she has back now, and remembers when she couldn’t speak, or move of her own will, or call out to the friends who were right in front of her. 

If Molly is trapped somewhere inside himself, she’ll wait forever, and freely pay in daily misery. 

But he is so hungry. Her traps, after a while, run empty. It is deep winter, and the creatures of the cursed forest are strange and strong, and she returns from her hunts empty handed more often than not. Molly begins to shrink again, the softness of his body melting away, and he starts to growl at her again, and stare at her with the violent intent of a cornered animal. She's been eating his leftovers, but there's not much of that, now, and hunger gnaws at her, as well. 

No one lives deep in the forest, and she knows, by now, how to avoid the hunters and trappers who sometimes venture past the forest's edge. But on that edge some people scrape out a life. There are chickens, horses. It takes time, for her to acquire livestock and return with it still alive. When she comes back, she discovers he's found his own meal. 

She cleans up after him. He'll get better, she thinks, he'll get better and this won't happen again. She just has to take better care of him.

On the day the snow begins to melt, the hunting party enters their forest. They come from Shady Creek Run. They come to deal with the monster of the Savalirwood. 

Yasha sees them, hears them discussing how best to trap and destroy their prey. And the darkness comes, the silence, just the same as it did when she ran from her tribe. When Zuala died. 

She wakes with blood on her hands, and blood on Molly’s lips. His long tongue licks them clean. 

“Darling Yasha,” he says. “Thank you for looking after me.” 

His arms encircle her back. She weeps into his warm shoulder. 

“It’s so good to be back,” he whispers into her ear.


End file.
